The recent emergence of “Computational Sociolinguistics” has led to a growing area of sociolinguistic inquiry that integrates social media data into analyses of language variation and change (e.g. Wieling et al. 2016). Given the prevalence of social media communication, this development is a necessary step to provide analyses which account for socially meaningfully linguistic behaviour beyond spoken mediums (Androutsopoulos 2016). However, current sociolinguistic, largely Twitter-based, analyses of social media tend to examine variation in isolation, with little or no consideration of how the online/offline personae of speakers interact and constrain variation (cf. Applied Linguistics, Tagg et al. 2016).
In this paper, I argue for a greater integration of social media and spoken language data in analysing linguistic variation. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a period of 12-months in an East-London youth group, I present self-recordings, interviews and a corpus of Snapchats collected from individuals aged 11-16. I explore how individuals’ Snapchat Stories reveal socially salient and meaningful connections to both the local community and the wider Multicultural London English (MLE) speaking population. In particular, I relate the use of stereotypical MLE features (Cheshire et al. 2011: TH-stopping, 'man' pronoun) with the speakers’ wider involvement in local (e.g the Caribbean diasporic community) and translocal (e.g. grime music) practices.
In doing so, I argue for an analysis of the sociolinguistic individual beyond the offline individuals’ practices in the increasing move towards integrating social media and digital identities into sociolinguistic analyses of language variation and change.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2016. Theorizing media, mediation and mediatization. In Nikolas Coupland (eds.). Sociolinguistics Theoretical Debates, pp.282-302. Cambridge: CUP.
Cheshire, Jenny; Paul Kerswill; Sue Fox & Eivind Torgersen. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 15(2):151–196.
Tagg, Caroline; Agnieszka Lyons; Rachel Hu & Frances Rock. 2016. The Ethics of Digital Ethnography in a Team Project. Working Papers in Translanguaging and Translation (WP. 12). (http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/generic/tlang/index.aspx).
Wieling, Martijn; Jack Grieve; Gosse Bouma; Josef Fruehwald; John Coleman & Mark Liberman. 2016. Variation and change in the use of hesitation markers in Germanic languages. Language Dynamics and Change. 6(2):199-234.
